Evidence and Violence: Factography Evolution from the Avant-garde to the Absurd and Camp Prose

Abstract

This article focuses on the Russian literary avant-garde and its development in prison camp prose and documentary writing. These texts reflected an anthropological experience and response to oppression and violence in human society. In this context, it is possible to see how literature and art in general are able to change ourselves and our reality, rather than just to entertain, console and bring subjective satisfaction. The experience of alienated labor, interpreted as the experience of violence, was expressed by avant-gardists in exaggerated imagery in their works. Therefore, I propose to study the avant-garde in the context of the extreme experience of violence, in which the political and the poetic are sometimes entwined.